“You needn't be shoutin' on the Lord's day. Meetin'-house steeple's a-fire.”
From Adam Wick's nothing could be seen but the slow column of smoke rising and curling around the slender steeple. But under the foliage Preston Plains was in tumult.
By night the church was saved, but the belfry was a blackened ruin within. The bell had fallen, through floor, cross-beams, and ceiling, and smashed the front of the choir gallery, a mass of fallen pillar, railing, and broken plaster on the floor.
Andrew Hill called a meeting. Adam Wick came, entered his cluttered pew and sat on the pillar that lay prostrate across it. He perched on it like a hawk, with huddled back and red-lidded eyes blinking. It was the sense of the meeting that modern ideas demanded the choir should sit behind the minister. The ruined gallery must be removed. Adam Wick rose.
“You've got no place in this meetin',” said Andrew Hill. “Set down.”
“Can't I subscribe twenty dollars to this church?” The chairman stroked his beard and a gleam of acrid humor lit his face for a moment.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose you can.”
And the eyes of all present looked on Adam Wick favorably.
The minister rose to speak the last word of peace.
“My friends, the Lord did it. He is righteous--”
“That's my idea!” said Adam Wick, like a hawk on his fallen pillar, red-lidded, complacent. “He did what was right.”
The minister coughed, hesitated, and sat down. Andrew Hill glowered from his chair.
“There's no further business before this meetin'.”
|The old book-shop on Cripple Street in the city of Hamilton was walled to its dusky ceiling with books. Books were stacked on the floor like split wood, with alleys between. The long table down the centre was piled with old magazines and the wrecks of paper-covered novels. School arithmetics and dead theologies; Annuals in faded gilt, called “Keepsake,” or “Friendship's Offering”; little leathern nubbins of books from the last century, that yet seemed less antique than the Annuals which counted no more than forty years--so southern and early-passing was the youth of the Annual; Bohn's translations, the useful and despised; gaudy, glittering prints of the poets and novelists; all were crowded together without recognition of caste, in a common Bohemia. Finding a book in that mystical chaos seemed to establish a right to it of first discovery. The pretty girl, who sat in one of the dim windows and kept the accounts, looked Oriental but not Jewish, and wore crimson ribbons in her black hair and at her throat. She read one of the Annuals, or gazed through the window at Cripple Street. A show-case in the other window contained stamp collections, Hindoo, Chinese, and Levantine coinage.